I can’t take credit for anything in this story. These are friends of mine who are now missionaries in Uganda. This is the latest from their blog site. Please take the time to read about what they are doing and how God is using them in Africa.
So I slammed my thumb with a rubber mallet one day. I wasn’t being particularly careful because in my mind I was thinking, “It’s a rubber hammer, not steel. If I hit my finger, how bad could it hurt?”
It hurt ………….. a lot.
Sin has a way of using the same argument to entice us into doing something we know we shouldn’t. “How bad could it hurt?”
Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save, nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear.
Most of the time when we fail, we look at the earthly consequences: I ran a red light and got a ticket; I didn’t study for my test so I received a bad grade; I was late for work three days in a row and I got fired. We pay attention to those consequences because they are right in front of us.
The full consequences of sin are not always so obvious; we may not discover until much later the depth of its destruction. One of the most difficult things to understand is how it affects our relationship with God. It’s not as though God doesn’t expect us to sin. He knows how weak we are. But when we sin, what do we do? Run and hide; pretend like nothing happened?
Unconfessed sin separates us from God. It creates a barrier between us and Him until we have been reconciled. However, Paul wrote in Romans 5 that “where sin increased, grace increased even more.” We have a very forgiving Father whose arms are always open and ready to receive us when we repent. But that’s the key isn’t it? We need to repent.
A rubber mallet may not appear dangerous, but try whacking your finger with one. Sin needs to be confessed and repented. Don’t assume it is safe to ignore.
A very uneducated football coach once said the following:
“Football is a game of stagedy: me tryin’ to out stagedize you, and you tryin’ to out stagedize me. The winner of dis yeer competishun will be de team dat iz de best at implicating der stragedy while executing der players.”
Yeah ………..
Unfortunately, that is about equal to many people’s plan for exiting life. They have none ………… or what they do have is so poorly planned that they leave a pile of wreckage behind.
Everyone needs an exit strategy. I’m not talking about financial responsibilities here – life insurance, etc. I’m talking about life after death. We all have a one way ticket to somewhere when we leave this planet. The question is to where?
You need to know where you’re going, and it would be good for everyone else to know where you’re going as well.
As I was jogging early this morning, before the dawn of time, there were a pair of owls hooting to each other. As you know, this animal does most of its hunting at night. How in the world do they find anything in the dark? Curious, I did a little research on owls:
“An owl uses unique, sensitive ears to locate prey by listening for prey movements through ground cover such as leaves, foliage, or even snow. When a noise is heard, the owl is able to tell its direction because of the minute time difference in which the sound is perceived in the left and right ear – for example, if the sound was to the left of the owl, the left ear would hear it before the right ear. The owl then turns its head so the sound arrives at both ears simultaneously – then it knows the prey is right in front of it. Owls can detect a left/right time difference of about 0.00003 seconds (30 millionths of a second!)”theowlpages.com
Jump back! Are you kidding me?! A 30 millionth of a second! That is some very keen hearing. Some of you may know that I suffer from acute tinnitus, ringing in the ears. Hearing does not come easy for me. So when I read about an animal that can hear with such accuracy, I can’t help but be amazed.
I can live with dull hearing; it may be inconvenient, but it doesn’t really affect my quality of life. What I cannot live with is dullness of the heart. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament warn us that we can become so dull in our “seeing and hearing” that we miss the grace of God. According to Ezekiel, it is the result of rebelling against God which hardens our hearts.
2 “Son of man, you are living among a rebellious people. They have eyes to see but do not see and ears to hear but do not hear, for they are a rebellious people.
17 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened?18 Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember?
Jesus ends this section with a very pertinent question, “Don’t you remember?” That is to say, the reason you fail to see and hear is because you have failed to remember something. You have forgotten the power of God that you experienced first hand. What power was that? In this case, when Jesus fed the multitudes with just a few loaves of bread. But all through scripture we see God’s mighty hand at work proving time and again that he is the Lord of all things.
To ignore the power of God is, in a sense, a form of rebellion, refusing to hear even though we have the ability. How do we ignore God? What are some things we do that show God that we don’t value what he has to say? Do we listen when he speaks?
As you work through this day, pay careful attention to what God may be saying to you.
In 1993, our family began supporting our first child through World Vision, a young boy in Kenya. We continued to sponsor him until he was too old for the program. For a while we lost contact until he managed to find me on Facebook; since then we have communicated regularly through social media and messaging.
Yesterday morning as I was about to walk out the door to go to church, I received a phone call. I looked at the caller ID and realized it was my once small child from Kenya, now 25, calling me by WIFI. Oh the marvels of modern technology! I was surprised because he had never attempted to call me. I answered and we talked for a while. During the conversation, I discovered something he hadn’t told me before; he had never known his father. His father had either disappeared or died when he was very young. Because of this, in a very touching way, he considers me his father, the only father he has ever known. When I asked why specifically he had called, he told me had never heard my voice and he wanted to know the sound of his father’s voice.
John 10:27-30 (ESV)
27 My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. 28 I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand. 30 I and the Father are one.”
There’s something comforting about a recognizable a voice. Children know the sound of their parents’ voices, parents know the sound of their children’s. Nothing soothes a child from a bad dream like the sound of his mother or father’s voice.
We long to know the voice of our Father. We long to hear him speak to us so that we can be reassured about who we are and where we are going. We long to know that we are loved and cared for, no matter what happens. We long to feel his arms around us and hear him say we are so important to him, that he would do anything, even die for us.
“In 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, a relatively new medium called the comic book unleashed a new kind of character into the consciousness of American youth. Created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, this character possessed superhuman powers and a dedication to using those powers for the benefit of humanity. Often battling and defeating evil as hyperbolic as his own goodness, his iconic name would become the source of the term for this all-American archetype, the “superhero.” In the decades since Superman‘s arrival, innumerable variations on this theme have emerged …….
The original Superman prototype possessed a key characteristic, one that his creators, first generation American sons of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, would have known something about, one that this “Man of Tomorrow” would pass on as part of his legacy to future generations of masked heroes: a secret identity. This trait would become an intractable part of the very definition of a superhero, as much a prerequisite for his mythology as extraordinary powers, or at least a flamboyant getup. ……. For Superman or Spiderman or Batman or virtually any other superhero from the prior century (save some like the X-Men) their secret identities were their most sacred possessions, the keys to their undoing, and they fought as hard to protect them as to save humanity itself.”social-creature.com
What does every dad want to be in the eyes of his family? A superhero …….. larger than life? Maybe. What is most certainly true is that most men see themselves entirely different from the man that others see. We all have a “secret identity” that only we ourselves truly know. We are intimately familiar with all aspects of that inner man and most of us, like Superman, will protect that secret identity at all costs.
Why? Because we are afraid of the consequences of being found out. We don’t want anyone to know that we are powerless when exposed to kryptonite. We don’t want to admit that we are not superheroes. We would prefer to go on pretending that we can challenge the world and conquer it with our clever intellect and prowess.
However, no amount of hiding or pretending can keep God from seeing what’s inside. He knows the deepest crevices in our foreheads and what worries created them. He knows our fears and what dangers cause us to flinch. He knows every hurt that has been covered up with a laugh so as not to appear weak.
But he also sees strength where we see weakness. He bestows wisdom to those we would consider fools. He rejects the front page images from magazine tabloids and chooses the unattractive over the attractive. He does not look at appearances but rather at the heart.
7 But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
God is able to take the weakest of men, the most uneducated, the least attractive, the least popular and use them as key players in his kingdom. He himself directs the training of each person so that they can realize their greatest potential, fulfilling their role and becoming the best they can be.
I’ve seen your sun rising in the morning I’ve seen your sky reflecting your glory I’ve heard your birds sing,
they’re calling out your name As they usher in a new day
“Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord rises upon you. 2 See, darkness covers the earth and thick darkness is over the peoples, but the Lord rises upon you and his glory appears over you.
8 “Who are these that fly along like clouds, like doves to their nests?
You really need to read this whole chapter to get the full picture of the message that Isaiah is bringing.
The image is one of darkness turned to light, sadness turned to happiness. Why? Because in the previous chapter, Isaiah explained what was separating the people from God ……… their sin. But God took away the sin, he removed the barrier between himself and his people. So although the morning begins in pitch darkness, it gradually becomes bright. Not by the light of the sun or moon, but by the everlasting light of the Lord. And once this light rises, it will never set. There will be no more gloom and darkness.
Sometimes the task in front of me is so overwhelming, all I want to do is give up. Recently I read a story about an Indian man who cut a path through a mountain by hand with nothing but a hammer and a chisel.
It was 1960. Landless laborers, the Musahars lived amid rocky terrain in the remote Atri block of Gaya, Bihar, in Northern India. In the hamlet of Gehlour, they were regarded the lowest of the low in a caste-ridden society and denied the basics: water supply, electricity, a school, a medical center. A 300-foot tall mountain – Gehlour Ganj – loomed between them and civilization.
Like all the Musahar men, Dashrath Manjhi, worked on the other side of the mountain. At noon, his wife Phaguni would bring his lunch. As they had no road, the trek took hours over the mountain. Dashrath tilled fields for a landlord on the other side. He would quarry stone. And in a few hours from then, he would be tired and hungry. He would watch and wait for Phaguni.
One of those days, she would come to him empty handed, injured. As the sun harsh sun beat down, Phaguni tripped on loose rock. Her water pot shattered. She slid down several feet, injuring her leg. Hours past noon, she limped to her husband. He rushed to chastise her for being late. But on seeing her tears, he made a decision.
Dashrath sold his goats, and bought a hammer, chisel, and crowbar. He climbed to the top, and started chipping away at the mountain. Years later, he would recount, “That mountain had shattered so many pots, claimed lives. I could not bear that it hurt my wife. If it took all my life now, I would carve us a road through the mountain.”
Word spread. Chipping at the mountain, he quit his wage job. His family often went without food. Then, Phaguni fell ill. The doctor was in Wazirganj, 75 kilometers over the mountain. Unable to make the journey, she died. But her death only spurred him on.
After 22 years, Dashrath Das Manjhi, the outcast landless laborer had conquered the mountain: he had carved out a road 360 feet long, 30 feet wide. Wazirganj, with its doctors, jobs, and school, was now only 5 kilometers away. People from 60 villages in Atri could use his road. Children had to walk only 3 kilometers to reach school. Grateful, they began to call him ‘Baba‘, the revered man.
When you hear a story like this, it makes you realize how trivial your problems are in comparison to someone else’s. It also makes you realize that insurmountable problems can be overcome if you just work at them long and hard enough.
Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
Never give up. Whatever it is that seems impossible, is possible with God’s help. Even a hole through a mountain.
Melisa Loyola, Brenda Loyola, Brad Claxton 2008 before Brad & Brenda started dating. They’re an old married couple now expecting their first child in August
One of my favorite summertime locations is Waterfront Park in Charleston SC. I especially love the fountains where children young and old can play in the water. I have great memories of my kids, and me, getting soaked there on a hot Saturday afternoon.
Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us …….
The word translated lavish has a very interesting definition: a person who lavishes is – generous, liberal, bountiful, open-handed, unsparing, free, extravagant. As opposed to scant, frugal, or meager. It comes from an Old French word lavasse which means “deluge of rain.” From Paul’s original Greek word perisseúō it means to give abundantly beyond and exceeding what is required or expected.
Like a fountain that never runs dry and soaks you from head to toe.
If you search hair styles from the late 80″s / early 90’s, you’re bound to run across this one – the “mullet.” Why the haircut was given the name “mullet” is a mystery. A mullet is a fish. If you’ve ever been to the beach, you probably swam with some since they’re common in warm coastal waters worldwide.
A lot of celebrities wore mullets back in the day: Jean Claude Van Damme, George Clooney, Jerry Seinfeld, Patrick Swayze, Billy Ray Cyrus, Chuck Norris to name a few. Look at Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman, both giants in the Christian music industry. They both had mullets too!
There was an interesting phrase that expressed the philosophy behind the “mullet” haircut – business in the front, party in the back. It’s a perfect example of a split personality. You see, all people tend to have dual personalities: capable of being very good and capable of being very bad.
Though everyone battles their own personal sin each day, for a Christian, there should be a clear delineation between the inward battle and the outward activity. There are some who think it perfectly okay to party hardy on Friday and Saturday night, as long as they get cleaned up on Sunday morning. Scripture gives a stern warning about that way of living:
2 Corinthians 6:14 – For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?
1 Peter 4:1-4 – For you have spent enough time in the past doing what pagans choose to do—living in debauchery, lust, drunkenness, orgies, carousing and detestable idolatry.
Romans 12:2 – Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind……..
Romans 13:12-14 – So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light. 13 Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in carousing and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy.
Matthew 7:21 – “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.
True followers of Christ cannot live a dual lifestyle: hell raiser one day – saint the next. What would you call that? Hypocritical? That’s sort of a mullet state of mind – business in the front, party in the back. It’s the very thing that Jesus blasted the Pharisees for doing. If the Holy Spirit is indeed living within, it should convict us to change.
Understandably, change does not come easy, so there is hope for every struggling soul. Even Paul wrote that he fought the inward battle to do the right thing:
Romans 7 – For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. …..24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?25 Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!
A new day is upon us. A new chance to move in the right direction. Here’s to slamming the door for good on a mullet state of mind. Mugs raised high!